Chapter 8 - Explaining de se phenomena

Summary

The rival approach to immunity does not come out of the blue, as an isolated proposal. Such proposals are of most interest when they are offered as an instance of the more general thesis, the thesis that there are no phenomena distinctive of ordinary uses of the first person, in a philosophical theory, to postulate a special de se notion or concept. The three salient issues in assessing the more general thesis are: the possibility of giving an account of a subject's file on himself that does not appeal to a first-person concept; the alleged dispensability of a first-person notion or concept in basic cases of action and perception; and the feasibility of treatments that attempt to explain away the role of the first-person concept or notion in imagination. The self-files and the phenomena they help to explain cannot be properly characterized without using the de se notion or concept.